Distributed by: Disney+
Directed by: Mark Tonderai, Julie Anne Robinson, Ben Chessell, Dylan Holmes Williams, Jamie Donoghue
Written by Anna Harrison
70/100
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: after a bumpy road and some time off the air, a guy named Russell T. Davies becomes showrunner for “Doctor Who,” rebrands his new season as “season one,” casts a young blonde woman as one of the leads, fills the season with fart jokes and a standout episode from another dude named Steven Moffat, and builds up too much steam before running out for the season finale, which is convoluted and slightly nonsensical but still manages to tug at the heartstrings. Sound familiar?
The year is not, as one might believe, 2005, but 2024, and after a rocky run of episodes from showrunner Chris Chibnall, Russell T. Davies has returned to “Doctor Who” to bring us back to the good old days—and in the process, reminds us that the good old days were not always that good.
The question of who is the best showrunner of post-2005 “Doctor Who” is hotly debated and likely to get you yelled at on the internet no matter who you support (the correct answer is Steven Moffat, by the way), but the general consensus of Chris Chibnall’s reign trends towards the negative. Moral inconsistency, bold but idiotic changes to canon, wooden companions, and a Doctor without a clear personality—despite Jodie Whittaker’s best efforts—ensured that many diehard fans dropped off. How, then, to lure them back?
Easy: repeat the past. Should be simple enough for a show about time travel, right? Just bring back Davies, who rescued the show in 2005 from obscurity and spearheaded what is widely (and incorrectly) regarded as the best era of “Who” when he cast David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor. Then, because Tennant is everyone’s favorite Doctor, why not bring him back, too? While we’re at it, what about Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), the beloved companion whose memory wipe in the season four finale, “Journey’s End,” remains one of the most devastating moments in the entire series? Add to that a new international distribution and production deal with Disney+ and an according influx of cash, and “Who” is back, baby! Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!
“Doctor Who” has never shied away from reusing actors or bringing back old Doctors; in fact, the Twelfth Doctor’s (Peter Capaldi) arc in his first season relied on the fact that Capaldi had previously appeared in season four’s “The Fires of Pompeii” (no mention of his brutal stint on “Torchwood,” though). But bringing back Tennant as a new Doctor with the same face—and personality—as an old one, even if only for three special episodes, is something else entirely, as there was practically no in-universe reason that the Doctor reverted to his old “face” for reincarnation number Fourteen, nor was their need for backtracking on one of the most affecting companion departures by reintroducing Catherine Tate.
The specials themselves range from “okay” to “solid,” but never quite do enough to justify all the hoops Davies must jump through to get Tennant and Tate’s presence to make sense. To recap: in 2022’s “The Power of the Doctor,” Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor has to regenerate for reasons best left unsaid. She regenerates into David Tennant as the Fourteenth-but-really-Tenth-again Doctor, who immediately runs into Donna and decides to hang out with her, despite us viewers being told repeatedly that he can never see her again or else she will remember him, her brain will overload, and she will die. This, it turns out, isn’t actually a problem, and is resolved in one episode alongside a very horrible line about how a “male-presenting” Doctor wouldn’t understand what it’s like to be a woman, despite the fact that he was a woman until just a few hours ago in-universe. That would have been an interesting conversation topic for the Doctor and Donna’s transgender daughter, Rose (Yasmin Finney), but instead gets reduced to a clunky line that makes no sense and is not funny at all. But okay. Sure.
The next two specials are much better—bordering on “pretty good”—and Tennant and Tate’s chemistry shines just as brightly as it did sixteen years ago. They serve as a refreshing reminder of what a good Doctor/companion duo can actually do, especially compared to the horribly bland companions of Chibnall’s era (Graham innocent). But can I interpret their return as anything other than obnoxious self-congratulation on Davies’ part for having written the most popular Doctor/companion pairing in modern “Who”? Nope. Plus, the Twelfth Doctor and Clara (Jenna Coleman) should be everyone’s favorite pairing anyway. Get some taste, people.
Even the Tenth/Fourteenth Doctor’s regeneration into Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor reads as Davies giving himself a massive pat on the back once more. When Neil Patrick Harris shows up as an old foe from classic “Doctor Who,” he hits the Doctor with some sort of laser beam and it’s regeneration time.
Regeneration has always been a somber affair in modern “Who,” likened to death for the individual Doctor. It’s the passing of a baton from one actor to another, the end of an era, the time for self-reflection, et cetera.
Except, in this case… it’s not any of those things. In a very, very silly turn of events, the Doctor “bi-generates” and the Fifteenth Doctor splits out of the Fourteenth, the latter of whom remains inexplicably alive and looking like David Tennant. I think it’s because of trauma? He needs healing from trauma? It’s the kind of nonsense you would expect to see from someone who changed the shape of the iconic sonic screwdriver to look less like a gun so it would discourage violence but has a teenager shooting a scooter submachine gun in the finale (true story). Congratulations, Russell T. Davies, you can have your cake and eat it, too. Aren’t you a clever boy! You figured out how to make copies of David Tennant have their own little domestic lives not once, but twice—for if you will recall, “Journey’s End” sees a version of the Tenth Doctor go off to live in a parallel world with Rose Tyler (Billie Piper). If I had a nickel…
It is, to put it simply, lazy.
The decision stings even more when the Gatwa appears for the first time, oozing so much charisma that Davies’s insistence on bringing back Tennant beforehand seems unfathomable. Why bring him back—good as Tennant is—when this new Doctor should have been celebrated from the get-go? From his very first appearance in a button-down shirt and tighty-whities, Gatwa commands the screen. Let’s celebrate that rather than remind everyone how much they loved the Doctor and Donna way back in 2008.
Now, finally, we get to the main season, which for some nonsensical reason has been pushed as “season one” by marketing but which I will be calling “season fourteen” because it is the fourteenth season of modern “Who.” Things start to look a bit more standard as we are introduced to our latest companion, Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), who is a blonde, working-class teenager—ah, wait, that sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Wasn’t Rose Tyler a blonde, working-class teenager who also gets swept up into the Doctor’s shenanigans? And her name also starts with an “R” and can be used to describe a shade of red? Ah, well. Ruby also dresses like Clara Oswald and, like Clara in her first season, serves more as a mystery to unravel than a character in her own right. Ruby is adopted and can make it snow, you see, and the villains this season seem unnerved by this fact. What are her hopes and dreams? What does she like or dislike? No one knows.
But at the very least the mystery of Ruby, if not her character, gets set up perfectly: Davies teases Ruby’s identity throughout the season, he has the same woman (Susan Twist) appear in every episode without drawing too much attention to her, he has the Doctor reference his children and grandchildren… It all seems to be building to something big, and then, in classic Russell T. Davies fashion, everything falls apart in a bombastically overwrought finale. Welcome back, seasons four and seven of “Doctor Who”! I missed you. In some ways, having a classic Davies season helps bring stability after the Chibnall years, but one would hope that, after having nearly twenty years to grow as a writer and showrunner, Davies would learn from his past mistakes and write a finale that actually answers everything and makes an iota of sense. Not so, it seems.
The finale reminds me of a quote from George R. R. Martin, which the showrunners of his own series should have recalled: “[If] I’ve been planting all these clues that the butler did it, then you’re halfway through a series and suddenly thousands of people have figured out that the butler did it, and then you say the chambermaid did it? No, you can’t do that.”
I will leave you to draw your own conclusions from that, because to dive into things that deeply would necessitate too many spoilers for this review and would take me a very long time to write when I’m already dreadfully behind on everything.
In Davies’ defense, Disney—now a production partner on the show—mandated shorter episodes and a shorter season, resulting in eight, forty-five minute episodes instead of the typical thirteen, hour-long episodes, meaning that Davies had significantly less time to cram in a satisfying season arc. That Disney money may have made the CGI look nicer, but can we please let shows be more than eight episodes again? Pretty please? Can we trust audiences to pay attention for an hour at a time? Even the stronger episodes had moments where we desperately needed more room to breathe.
But in all fairness, there were quite a few strong episodes. In fact, most of the episodes ranged from “decent” to “pretty darn good.” Only the atrocious season opener “Space Babies” and the finale episodes really struggle; for “Doctor Who,” to have only three bad episodes in a season is almost a miracle. “Rogue,” my favorite of this year, provides a fun twist on “Bridgerton,” and Jonathan Groff as the titular Rogue has enough charisma to go toe-to-toe with Gatwa and nearly steal the show. “Boom” from Steven Moffat has the Doctor immobile for the whole episode as he must figure out how to get off a landmine without blowing himself up. “Dot and Bubble” starts off as a fun riff on social media bubbles before turning into a much more sinister tale, and in “Maestro,” drag queen Jinkx Monsoon transforms into one of the best villains of modern “Who.”
Still, nearly all of these episodes feel as though they have important scenes cut for time. The whirlwind one-episode romance between the Doctor and Rogue feels far too whirlwind and strains credulity even for a show about a time-traveling alien with two hearts. After a strong first third, everything in “Boom” goes by so quickly that some of the more emotional beats fail to land properly, and scenes begin to feel disjointed. “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” and “Empire of Death,” the two-part finale, has no time to breathe as it rushes from point A to point B.
I think of the complex, codependent relationship between the Twelfth Doctor and Clara, or the enduring love between Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill) in the time of the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith). I think back to “The End of Time,” which managed to find space for this conversation in the middle of a series finale (although, of course, much of the emotional crux of this conversation is now moot considering that Donna is totally fine with remembering everything… but alas). That episode is perhaps Davies’ most convoluted piece of writing from his time as showrunner, which is saying quite a lot, and still he could find time for a scene like that. It advances no plot; it’s simply two characters sitting and talking, and it still tugs on my heartstrings years later (shoutout to the late, legendary Bernard Cribbins). I cannot think of a single scene like that between the Doctor and Ruby, despite the able performers that embody the characters.
But all that said, after whatever Space Amazon-apologetic, murder-is-okay-as-long-as-it’s-not-via-gun nonsense Chibnall gave us, a solid season (once Davies took his nostalgia goggles off) with some glaring flaws is… well, it’s fine by my book. It gives me hope for future seasons, which is not something I’ve felt in a long time, and you know what? I’ll take that.
Episode ranking (minus the specials) (I know no one asked):
- Rogue
- Dot and Bubble
- Boom
- The Devil’s Chord
- 73 Yards
- The Legend of Ruby Sunday
- Empire of Death
- Space Babies
“Doctor Who” Season Fourteen Trailer
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